The Social Media Goldmine Brands Are Ignoring with Matthew McGrory

If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter? One of the reasons is because he's got this idea in his head of turning X into this massive platform like they have in China with Weibo and the other ones where it's got a payment platform. It's got advertising in it. It's got the products in it. It's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what's now. And you know it's right, baby. You know it's right, because we're talking about it. Hey, at least we think it is. In our own heads, to your minds. I'm excited. We get to talk one of my favorite topics, social media. And being a marketing guy, if you're not into social media, then you're probably not really into marketing, because it is the way to market these days. But there's a lot of talk about what it is, what it isn't, about marketing, What flows through social media? So no better person to come on than the CEO of Arwen.ai. He is Matthew McCrory. What's up, Matthew? Hey, nice to be on the show. Thanks for having me. I was pumped. The news has been in your space. I know marketing well enough with PR. Hey, that's free rising to the top. You want it to be top of mind. Lots of news in the social media space. The first inception of R1 was as a moderation tool. So there's been lots of talk about moderation, free speech, censorship. With our audience, we got that treadmill crowd. I hope whoever's, if you're listening, wherever, whenever you are, I hope you get that heart level up. We got to be about 85 right now. Then I'm going to take you to 115 because we're going to talk about moderation. And look, one of my favorite quotes, Matthew, is everything in moderation, especially moderation. Yeah. And there's a well-known blog in the trust and safety sector called Everything in Moderation, which talks about everything in the space. And I think for me, this is about like brand safety. We typically, our clients are brands. We like Formula One's a client, ATP tennis are a client. And this is about individual choices of individuals to protect themselves in cases where they have to be subjected to things that probably most of us wouldn't really like. The tipping point here is where people are removing content completely off social media channels. The way Elon Musk has set up X means that if you want to say your opinion, that's fine. And if I choose not to listen to your opinion, I can shut you up. I just decided that I don't want to listen to it anymore and I don't want my followers to listen to it. So very often where it becomes a bit of a sensitive point is we have elite sports clients and them as individuals, they have tens of millions of followers that they would say, my hard work has brought me these followers. So if I don't want my followers to hear what this person over here is going to say, I don't want them on my channel. Whereas I don't want them on my channel. I think where Elon's going is Elon saying, but that person still should be allowed to shout out whatever they want to say on their channel. This is where the Facebook, the meta U-turn that happened when Zuckerberg kind of realized that to get into good books, they were going to have to make some policy changes. There's been some interesting stuff released about what the Biden administration was asking meta to do during the pandemic, which... I haven't seen, I've just seen rumor and speculation. I haven't seen cold hard facts yet. But if that was the case, then that shouldn't be a place where we're going. Things should be allowed to disseminate. We draw a line on what we call illegal stuff, which is below the line, which is child sexual exploitation, where people are doing death threats. Things that are at the extreme end of the toxicity scale. We draw the line at what we call the lawful but awful. Lawful but awful should be absolutely fine. That stuff is allowed, but it should be up to individuals in the community whether they want to listen to it. The analogy I generally use on demos with clients is Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse. So he's the bouncer. He's brought in by the owner of the bar to clean it up because people are smashing the bar up. And the owner wants a nice hospitable place. He doesn't want the band to get smashed with beer bottles every night. And we're very much trying to create a world like that, that it's based on choice. There are bars that still exist like that, and that's fine. You can go in and you can throw beer bottles at the bars protected with a cage. And there are other bars that are suitable for your family. And you come in and you have a nice, polite conversation, and we welcome everyone. And it's free choice. And I live near the home of the British Army. Around me, there are loads of bars, what we would call swaddy bars, where the army folk will go. And you can go down there on a Friday night, and they'll be a bit fruity, and it'll get a bit exciting. Or you can go the other way, and you go to your bar where you have your Sunday race. Now, digital channels are exactly the same. It's like you want to create spaces for your audiences where they want to come and have meaningful conversations. And that's what we're really trying to do, and really policing that for the brands themselves. We don't do that for the social media organizations. I do want to add one point. You mentioned the Biden administration. You're overseas, it's not your job to know the everything, but I am gonna quote exactly what they did because Zuckerberg said it in front of Congress under testimony that he was pressured to censor, and they did censor, COVID information on Facebook, which is bullshit. The Zuckerbergs both had a coming to Jesus, so to speak, for his own platforms and also gotten a little bit of chutzpah behind him because the guy's like doing UFC now. I don't know if it's all related. Some people would call that toxic masculinity. I would just call it seeing the world as it should be, which is 100% agree. No hate, threats of violence. That bullshit needs to be taken out. We can all align on that stuff. But political-based pressuring on these platforms that's been taking place in the U.S., and Zuckerberg's just the only one that got up there and admitted it, has been happening. And that's the stuff that just drives truth is in the eye of the beholder. It's a very convenient catch-all, disinformation, misinformation. We've been very careful to try and avoid it. We do get rid of a lot of spam, but that's typically around the subject of it might be You're trying to read an article, you really don't want that in the way. It's poor form for content. There's another 100 miles of this road to travel, if I'm honest. Admire is probably too strong a word, but I would certainly respect Zuckerberg for doing what he did and actually shedding some light on the topic. That is normally the best tonic for these things. Shed some light on the truth. You're going to find that Europe were not particularly well behaved during the pandemic. You're going to find that European governments are going to be held to account over the next... Five to 10 years as we go through our own little postmortems of how people behaved during the pandemic. And there are a lot of things that shouldn't have happened. And there are a lot of views that were pushed on us. Propaganda is what it would have been called 60, 70 years ago, in my personal opinion. We as Americans go through what's called audits with our taxes. We get audited. There needs to be an accounting. I don't really want to drudge up this shit. I'm a guy that doesn't have a rearview mirror. Let's go forward. We got to make sure we learn from the past so we don't repeat it. The future is the biggest thing that I would take away. I will say that's what I love about what you're doing is it seems to be you guys are headed down the road of the right moderation with the stuff that we can all universally agree. And as a brand and as a company that you don't want in your content, you don't want your customers get subjected to that. That's why I really like what you guys are doing with Arwen. The flip side of all this is the good stuff. The whole point of social media is so that we can all have a conversation, but it's monetized by the brands who want to have a conversation with their clients, with their customers. What we worked out is, as well as detecting the bad stuff, we call it your sort of golden tickets in your comment mountain. Because most brands have got a comment mountain of what people are saying to them, and most of them aren't listening to it. They're not listening to their customers. They're not listening to buying signals from their clients. And that's where the commercial imperative is. That's where I use the example. I sort of name and shame brands when I talk to them and say, here are some comments that were on your social media channels in the last two weeks and you haven't replied to. And they will be really obvious things like, where can I buy this? Can I get this in blue instead of red as it's shown on the Instagram channel? Really obvious things that people aren't responding to. We're moving into a monetization phase on social media that isn't just... as it is today, which is just billboard advertising, which is where we've been stuck in on this stuff for the last few years. It's much more interactive. If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter? One of the reasons is because he's got this idea in his head of turning X into this massive platform like they have in China with Weibo and the other ones where it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it. It's got the products in it. It's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media, which I think is where Elon wants to take it. I think he's being held up on the road of that journey at the minute. He's like any good entrepreneur, distracted sometimes. It's interesting that you brought up the Weibo thing. And it's funny, I was walking around the mall on Sunday, and I don't go to the mall very often here in these states. But I was thinking in terms of like social media, and when I think of what you're talking about with building it, there's a place that I'm now seeing more clearly than I did. I kind of panned the whole metaverse bullshit for five years ago because I thought we were ahead of it. I don't know if you're old that it wasn't real yet. hey, I'm going to get into space. And yeah, I know that I care what my skin is and that my shirts are, but it wasn't quite there. But now I can see this interplay of transactional merchandise, like what you're talking about meets digital meets social, the digital mall. Because when you look around the mall, it is like this combination of social, because people are having conversations or walking around in these courts and things. And I almost have this vision now that I see what you're saying with X. becoming that digital place of social plus shopping plus interaction. That's where you're kind of painting, right? Absolutely. There's this like meta release, this kind of metaverse world, kind of this platform concept of everything being in the same place, making it really convenient. I don't have to put my credit card details because they're all kind of stored somewhere. So the whole pain of selection and transaction and buying all that pain is very much taken care of these platforms getting even stronger than they are because they're going to eek onto the high street either high street here in the uk is becoming smaller and smaller we've got less retail outlets and certainly more like restaurants we joke in the uk about the proliferation of charity shops all our kind of market towns are filled with seven or eight charity shops where if we went back 10, 15 years, there might be one or two. Yeah, it's great for the charities. They're getting free retail store. It's a product of the fact that a lot of this stuff is moving online. A lot of the experience of how do I buy things? How do I interact? How do I ask questions? It's becoming a little bit more real and certainly unbiased. the AI revolution is playing into that because I can experience things with AI that I couldn't do before. I can talk to an avatar I couldn't do before and it will respond in a slightly more human-like way. We're still at base one, but hopefully we're gonna get to base two and base three fairly quickly, it would appear. That train is moving fast. You can see it with machine learning and everything. It's both exciting and scary sometimes. Talking with Matthew McCrory, he is the CEO of Arwen.ai. It's interesting looking at the Arwen platform. It makes me think of this world that we live in where you have all this content being pushed out, words, pictures, type, all that. And like you said, you're helping brands engage because finding the nuggets that could be transactional opportunities or brand opportunities, which is what I'm hearing. It goes to show that there's so much data and so many micro conversations happening on social media. that there's power in the intelligence that can provide when it is rolled up for you and gives you these signals. And at its core, I feel like that's what you guys are doing with Engage particularly. We've got a retail hospitality chain here that owns about 2,400 bars across the UK. They want to do things like we've just launched our new menu in one of our brands that might be 200 bars. How did people feel about that? What was the sentiment? What was the most talked about thing? Did they like the burgers? Did they like the new ribs that we released? Did we change the chips? Did anyone complain about the fries? That's really where people want. They want that intelligence of what people are saying so they can react to it. That could inform product decisions that they're making. and help them respond to people in a more informed and grown-up way. We worked with some sports teams in Formula One. One of the teams came to us and said, well, we want to know what people are saying every 15 minutes throughout the race because we want to react to it as the race happens. It's a two-hour race. In hour three, the story's dead, but we want to react to it. 30 minutes in, something happens. There's a pit stop. The lead changes. There's a safety flag, that type of stuff. The creators want to react. more quickly in a more authentic way to how what the audience is talking about some of those channels get you know 200 250 000 comments over a race weekend there's a lot of stuff so bringing those boiling those things to the surface is really important so that they can authentically dive into the right conversations that kind of generate more excitement they can use it to Think about how the press conference is good. They can lead the drivers to say certain things in the press conference. That could be both to promote good stuff. It could also be to stop bad things from happening. Really interesting, Le, really interesting how people are using the tech, the AI tech in lots of different ways to pick up different signals on social media. I worked on one of the first visualizations of social media for Verizon Wireless in 2010. We did a gigantic Twitter sentiment board. It was live at the NFL game, and it would light up and do things. It was based on sentiment, things like that. It was very rudimentary. This is 14 years ago. I want to just clearly for our audience, though, talk about specifically the advancements in how you're using AI of how this isn't just a sentiment type thing, how it is actionable and really like comes to life for people or in brands. The way we approach this is like you've got to really understand your client, your customer, what they're looking for. Very often it's kind of a PR related message. A good example is I interviewed someone from a very well-known global drinks brand, and they're very sensitive about people talking about them polluting the oceans with plastic. They spend an awful lot of money cleaning the oceans, hundreds of tons of plastic. They have a whale preservation program and they want to tell people about that. What we're able to do is we're able to take the messages that they're looking for and with the advancements in AI, specifically large language models, we're able to create synthetic data sets. The client gives us 10 source comments. They kind of say, we're looking for stuff that sounds like this. Whenever that gets posted, we want to lean into that conversation and we want to tell them, look, we're not polluting the oceans. We're saving the whales. We're saving the dolphins. And we remove this. So PR and kind of crisis people are using these things to get to very specific content in very specific ways. More generalistic, people are using those large language models technique. It's a bit techy, and I'm not gonna profess to be an expert on this, but there's a technique called RAG, which was developed by Facebook, which takes a customer's own data, so their own voice, their brand guidelines, their brand voice, the responses that they give to their call center to talk to their clients, pulls that all together, Couple that with the large language model to generate authentic on-brand voice responses for clients. So they use it inbound. How can we detect specific messages? And they're using it outbound for the suggested replies. Normally, it's suggested to a human agent, and they kind of have the last call and edit it of how we respond to that. That's really come about in the last 18 months to two years with where open AI and the whole large language model movement has gone and been able to take that. We can do lots more than we used to. Just process so much more data quickly. And then not only process it, it can interpret. It's the interpretation probably that's the stuff that will blow your mind. is picking up on these, like for brands, it's picking up on specific messages normally that they're looking for, but they're also after the intelligence that kind of don't know that's there. I wouldn't say finding it is easy yet, but it's democratizing access to the data because we've got a development we're doing at the minute. I mean, it's a bit cheesily named in its prototype. It's called Ask Arwen. And Ask Arwen is really, it's aimed at the kind of the non-tech person within a marketing team or a social media team who wants to ask a question of their data. So it might be, what was the most positive 10 comments made on my social media? What was the most top three talked about topics on my social media? So the idea is you could have a conversation with your social media channel and ask it questions. On TikTok, what was my most talked about event? which channel did the most, you're pulling all this data out in the way humans like to do it, which is I want to ask a question and I want to get an answer that isn't deeply technical. Bad news for some of the data analysts who spend their days kind of translating what a marketing director might give them and then turning it into SQL query to interrogate data. This will be really game-changing because it will allow businesses to make quick, rapid decisions in the moment. When we get to that point, we're going to see if it makes creativity within ad campaigns really, really exciting. Is this a product and, you know, what the development that goes into this that's for large brands only? How scalable is this? Obviously, I get that a mom-and-pop coffee shop doesn't need to scan a million pieces of data, but... But there's e-commerce brands that might be smaller, but they serve a large, wide audience or they'd like to. And intent data would be very valuable to them. Is this attainable or reachable or scalable? Where does that start and stop with Arwen? Our model is really... To address that part of the market is to do it through partners. There are a lot of organizations that already have partners that are helping them, they're doing these types of things. So we partner with both traditional outsourcers that are providing people services, customer experience type services, and also with marketing agencies. They're kind of there are two kind of go-to markets from partners. Most of those organizations are providing insights, client intelligence, all these types of things. So what we're trying to do is our go-to-market. We are going direct as well, but we're kind of layering that into the services that they're providing. It becomes intrinsic when people are doing campaigns. Further down than that, like you say, kind of e-commerce, yeah, we're working with partners that go into the SME marketplace. We're able to give it to them, and they're able to give it to their sector. A lot of these insights are very often sector specific. Once you understand the sector or work with a sector specialist partner, you can drive real good economies of scale and therefore make the products available to lots of people. We're early stages, but I definitely think we're not far from this being very affordable very quickly. We're not talking five years. We're talking 12 months. And lots of startups are building this into their kind of strategy about how they target that mass market of businesses that aren't enterprises. You might have a target market in mind, but tools like this could help you pivot and or adapt target markets that are maybe larger or different than what you anticipated. If suddenly your product has a use case or is gaining steam with soccer bombs for some reason, you could build niche target markets from this data that might not have been your first inclination. Definitely. The other thing that's coming in Europe, we're beholden to GDPR regulations and probably a are slightly stripped away than in the US. But some of those demographic overlays are quite important. There's lots of businesses now stepping into that fray. You can get alongside the insights data, you can get a demographic overlay. We were able to tell a sports governing body that we said 20% of your audience, of your followers is women, but they provide 60% of the positive sentiment on your channels. So go and recruit more women. They send a great message out. Those types of nuggets, you have to think through how to write the reports. The large language model product is really changing that and allowing you to discover exactly as you're talking about, different demographics, different target markets within what you're doing. The key is you have to have a conversation to start with. At the heart is the creativity around the storytelling. You've got to excite people with your ads or your message or your content. So you kind of got to have a conversation to start with. Otherwise, no one's commenting on your socials and you've got nothing to analyze in the first place. In theory, how does it work? It's just industry aggregation of data. Okay, it's one thing for Coca-Cola that wants to know their billion customers, how they're talking about it. It's another for Coca-Cola startup that wants sentiment data for the industry. You might work with both. I know that going straight to brands or an agency or the brand might be, but you can also roll up categorically. You can do a bit of that, but a lot of that data is tied up, certainly on Meta. I don't know if it was big news in the US, but the Cambridge Analytica scandal over here, the UK company that was targeting individuals as part of the election campaigns, we're going back 10 years now, Meta had to reapply kind of all its data privacy policies and laws. Now getting any permissions to access data, for us to do that, we have to go through a complete app review process. It takes at least two weeks every time we tweak a change. It's a real lengthy process. A lot of the data is tied up in those data pools. So is actually accessible to the kind of base companies. Some sell it like X, you can sign up to their data, or you can sign up to one of the big social listening platforms. They're listening to the 10% social media sentiment that's going around the Sprinklr, Brandwatch. These are the big players in those sectors. But they're spending a lot of money to get hold of that data and put it in these vast data pools. The only way you can do it affordably is to know exactly where you're looking. You have to have a kind of use case in order to do that. Doing it generally is quite expensive at the moment. Interesting distinction. And I can understand if you're wanting personalized data, it's actually the roll up of that data and what it tells you, not necessarily so that I can target Jane Smith because I know she wants to buy it, but more that the aggregation of that knowledge, and I'm not suggesting anything nefarious here, Matthew, but scraping what is public information for posts that are public and not necessarily made to only specific people or whatever, that that information could be aggregated in a way that could tell you things. And I'm not saying that's what Arwen does, but I don't know where the line gets drawn with publicly available data versus your personal profile and then targeting you with leather shoes because we know you like that. You can certainly do that within the ad platforms, within social media. We do retargeting lists for clients. They run a meta ad. We analyze who looked at it, who responded it within the meta ecosystem. And then we tell them the next time you run the ad, don't run it against this audience because they don't like you. Don't run it against this audience because they do like you. We find that happens in lots of different micro communities. You can definitely do it within your own data set, but aggregating up is more challenging. There are definitely businesses out there that do scraping. There's nothing illegal to doing that, as you say. It's totally publicly available information. Arwen doesn't do it because we signed a T's and C's agreement with Meta that says we won't do that. So we only do it. it on kind of information that's in the box there are businesses that do that and they aggregate data up and that's useful we can access it and anyone can access it via x but you have to pay to access the x api you obviously only get an x view of the world then you don't get an x facebook kind of instagram view of the world which or and tiktok which a lot of marketing professionals will want that kind of full view of what's going on Do you guys enrich that? Does Arwen enrich those in the data that you have access to within the box of the brand? Are you enriching that data for targeting on digital channels? Only so far as we'll partner with demographic type organizations. We'll take an audience that reacted positively to maybe an ad or to an organic campaign. We'll take all those people and then we'll say, can you find me more people like this? We'll do a demographic analysis exactly as you were saying. they're soccer bums, they're on the East Coast, they look like this, that the client could then run another lookalike campaign to target more people that look like those people. You can enrich it in that sense of the word, but it's very difficult without doing it manually in this data private world to do that in an automated fashion anymore. Going back 10 years, you'd have great pools filled of people doing that data enrichment. Matthew, as we close out the episode here, where is it all headed for Arwen? What's sort of your future vision where this world of moderation on social media is headed and how you see Arwen being a part of it? With everything that's happened in the last sort of six months, we're definitely headed to, from our perspective, probably on the main channels, a much more generally toxic environment. I think the pendulum swung one way. It went too far. It's going to swing back the other way. It'll swing past the middle. and go to the other side. Yeah, we know it will. Yeah, that's what always happens in these cases, which is unfortunately good for us because we'll be standing there waiting to help people, to protect people's brand. That's the sort of the kind of me too bit of the job, the moderation side. Where we hope things are heading, what we call insights, intelligence, that's a little bit more exciting. It's about creating more engagement. That's what we think the future is on social media. It's kind of giving people exactly what they want, not hammering them with loads of ads that they don't really want to see. Getting in the way of their kind of user journey that they want. They're accessing news and leisure and all sorts of their hobbies, etc. on these social media channels. So don't get in their way. Give them exactly what people want. Giving people that intelligence as to how people behave online and what they respond to and what their interests are. That should help brands give people the content they want. I see that becoming more affordable to more businesses and being able to do it much quicker. And you don't need as big a skill set as you used to technically in order to deliver it. I love it. Where can everyone keep up with everything that you're doing, Matthew, with Arwen? Look at our website, arwen.ai. We post all our news on there. And that's kind of the main channel. LinkedIn is my network of choice. That's where I kind of live and breathe and post stuff. I'm on all the other social medias because I have teenage children and I have to check up on them occasionally. Yes, I live in that world myself. If Arwen can help protect them from some of the bad guys, I'm all for it. I just want it to be done in a world where we're not moderating opinion. Totally agree with you. Matthew, it's a pleasure having you on. I really appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan, for having me. Hey, guys, you know where to find us, ryanisright.com. You'll find highlight clips from today's episode, the full YouTube video and audio, and, of course, all the links to social media for Arwen and myself and the show. We appreciate you. We know you have a choice in podcasting. Thank you for making us number one. We'll see you next time. Right about now. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram, at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at ryanisright.com. This is Right About Now. Now quit waiting. Go win.